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Science Friday

Spring Sounds, Luxury Ostrich Eggs, ISeeChange. April 10, 2020, Part 2

Science Friday

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Science, Life Sciences, Wnyc, Natural Sciences, Friday

4.4 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2020

⏱️ 48 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Enjoying Spring From Quarantine You may be trapped inside, but outside, it’s bird migration season. Flowers are blooming from coast to coast, and even the bees are out getting ready for a year of productive buzzing around.  Producer Christie Taylor talks to Atlanta birder and Birds of North America host Jason Ward, and Nature Conservancy land steward Kari Hagenow about the best ways to get started as a new birder under quarantine. Then, University of California entomology researcher Hollis Woodard takes us to the mountains of California, where bumblebee queens are just starting to emerge to start their colonies—and why bringing bees to your yard or windowsill this summer can be as joyful an act as birding.  The Luxury Ostrich Eggs Of The Bronze And Iron Age Upper Class In the Iron and Bronze age, one of the luxury goods of choice was to put a highly decorated ostrich egg in your tomb. These status symbols have been found in multiple European Iron and Bronze Age locations, despite ostriches not being indigenous to the area. A team of scientists wanted to know the origins of these eggs—and just how they made it from Africa into the hands of the Iron and Bronze Age elite. Mediterranean archaeologist Tamar Hodos, an author on the study recently published in Antiquity, explains how the team determined that these eggs came from wild ostriches, rather than captive birds, and what this reveals about the ancient luxury trade.  Citizen Scientists Are Helping Document Our Changing Planet Our community science continues this week with a project about how climate change touches neighborhoods and the people who live in them. Ira talks to Julia Kumari Drapkin, the CEO and founder of ISeeChange, about how citizen observations about rainfall, new spring flowers, and even how you feel can be valuable data for climate science—plus, how tracking that data benefits you.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Just a note that we won't be taking your calls during this

0:06.4

pre-recorded hour of the show. First up, when you want people to know that you've really made it,

0:12.4

there are certain symbols or objects that you buy to show off, right? Could be a Rolex watch

0:18.8

that costs as much as a down payment on a house? Could maybe be a garage

0:23.2

full of cars, Ferraris, and Rolls, Royces. But back in the Iron and Bronze Age, if you wanted to

0:29.8

flaunt your worth, you'd have a tomb full of carved ostrich eggs. Why, ostrich eggs? And how did you get your hands on one? That's what a team of

0:39.9

scientists wanted to know. Their findings were published this week in the journal Antiquity.

0:44.9

Science Friday producer Alexa Lim spoke to Tamar Hodos, an author on that study and a specialist

0:50.9

in Mediterranean archaeology at the University of Bristol in Bristol, England.

0:56.0

Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. I'm really delighted to be here. I guess my first question

1:00.3

when I heard about these ostrichags is, what were they doing with them? They weren't walking around

1:05.2

with them in their arms, kind of saying, look at me right here I am. The ones that we find in the

1:09.3

Mediterranean are almost always in funerary context.

1:12.8

So they're turning up in graves.

1:14.6

Some of them are incredibly ornately decorated.

1:18.0

They were fashioned into cups or jugs.

1:21.7

So they would have had metal fittings, metal attachments to them.

1:25.3

But they were also painted or carved with animal motifs,

1:29.5

geometric motifs, floral motifs. Sometimes they show charioteers. So they're really ornately decorated.

1:37.5

What we're not sure is exactly how they were being used. Were they being used as part of the

1:42.5

funerary rituals? Or do they have some other

1:45.3

additional, perhaps symbolic value? We really don't know. And it's likely to have differed from

...

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